


Ears

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, bunnylock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 19:04:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes has rabbit ears that no one ever touches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ears

John Watson was as ordinary as can be, but he had known a few classmates in school with Traits. There had been ears, and an odd tail or two amongst his acquaintances his whole life. In secondary school some of the girls with cat ears had been quite popular, in fact. John had been close with a doberman eared man from Bournemouth in his unit who had a real reputation as a Lothario. Others tended towards fluffy hair styles to minimize their peculiar appendages, insecure in their 5% standing in a largely homogenous society. It generally went one of two ways- people found your Trait alluring, or you retreated into your own shell (Not that John had ever heard of someone with a shell.) Sometimes people traited with close, cropped ears were easy to pass over at a glance. They could have hidden it, and sometimes did. After all, London was often chilly enough to warrant a hat. He'd never seen someone like this though. Short of pinching a mitre off the Pope there wouldn't be much luck to hide this Trait. John had somehow found himself arranged to flat with an undeniably and exaggeratedly rabbit eared man called Sherlock. Some parents are just cruel, he mused.

 

There had been a rock album John had purchased in his youth that had a label printed : FOR THE MAXIMUM EXPERIENCE PLAY THIS ALBUM AT FULL VOLUME. John imagined this must be how Sherlock always experienced his environment. The constant stream of data, plucked out of the air, ceaselessly sorted out from cacophony to content. Trying to imagine what it must be like to have two radar dishes strapped to his brain like that gave John a migraine. Sherlock might wince a little more easily at a blaring car alarm, but for the most part, it was a wonder to watch him pick out some unexpected resonance in an seemingly abandoned building and identify a nearly disguised twang in an accent.

“Amazing,” John said, when Sherlock had identified the make of a kidnapper's vehicle through a ransom call.

“Brilliant,” when he alerted a bomb squad to the location of a detonation device.

“I'm going to rip those off your head,” when Sherlock passed comment on the unusually lengthy shower John had taken.

 

So on they went, the seemingly omniscient Consulting Detective and his imperturbable assistant. Well, imperturbable about most things. Faced with a dismembered corpse or an aimed gun John Watson would get down to business. At a crime scene where the forensics team snicker about his flatmate who is potentially the most prodigious mind in Britain- he will shift his weight on and off his bad leg with twice the frequency, and clear his throat when he has nothing to say.  
“You don’t need to point that out,” John reminded Sherlock.

“I’ve become used to pointing out things to imbeciles, it escaped me that you’d already taken notice of your own distracting behavior.”

“Right,” John concluded, as Detective Inspector Lestrade came up to the pair.

“Gents. I’ve got a run down of the tire prints in and out of scene for you, and a time stamped report from the security staff, among other things.” Lestrade offered a manila envelope to Sherlock who rolled his eyes and stalked off, leaving John to take it.

“Good to know the Yard’s best are on their toes,” Sherlock called over his shoulder as he retreated to the taped off area.

“We don't just sit on our tails all day until you show up, Sherlock. This is our actual job, you know.” Lestrade quirked his head before ever so slightly turning to John,“He's got one hasn't he?”

“One what?”

“A tail, of course,” Lestrade shook his head.

“I don't- I don't know, I don't think about it,” John spit out.

“Oh. Sorry mate, I thought you two were- well.”

“We're not-”

“-At it like rabbits.”

“That's just-” John wasn’t sure what it was, but ‘Speciesist’ seemed inaccurate.

 

Of course that mystery wasn’t long lived, what with the The Great Sheet Sulk of 2011. John could have done without finding his business partner and himself summoned to the the damned Palace while one of them insisted on remaining in the buff. It was mortifying, then superficially amusing, and then mortifying again. He was almost relieved when Mycroft, Sherlock’s fox eared brother appeared, but his presence only exacerbated Sherlock’s refusal. Then he’d nearly ripped away his brother’s modest shroud, revealing a pert and fluffy little tail atop the curve of his rump. It was all John could do to mask a near full-body spasm- to what? To swaddle him back up or to inspect it, or to run screaming from the room. His knees weren’t sure and neither was his brain. 

The case had been routine enough, going in- with a definite surprise.

“Ears John!”

“Yes, I know.. The same-” John was not keen on dwelling, honestly. It had been humiliating to find himself so blatantly jealous of Irene. Her brash manner, disarming even a man like Sherlock. Clever. Beautiful. And of course, her slender black rabbit's ears. A perfect match. And being so clever, Irene not only noticed John's envy but practically set up a marquee and sold tickets to the discovery. Maybe, just maybe, Sherlock would be so addled by his following misadventure with the drug she dosed him that he wouldn't recall it.

“She _touched_ them John... Unacceptab- tab- tabull...”

He hadn't seen that, but didn't doubt it. A opportunist like Irene would take what she pleased. John resisted thinking how a woman like her, The Woman- knew exactly how to touch it once she got it.

“Well we'll be sure to chop her hands off for such an offense, your majesty,” John said. He had finally flopped Sherlock up the stairs of 221b, and paused to catch his breath.

“Youm. You- might. John,” Sherlock slurred, pinned to the wall of the landing by one of John's sturdy arms.

“Mm? Might what?” But that was as much as he was going to get out of his incapacitated friend, so he heaved him over his shoulder and into the flat.

In pursuit of a suspect one night, they found themselves in a decomposing brownstone, wrestling away a firearm. A shot fired off past John, showering the struggle in chunks of a ceiling that could take no more of this world. In a blur Sherlock's fist connected with the man's face in a sickening crunch, and his wild eyes flitted momentarily to check on John before he fished a ziptie out of his capacious pockets to restrain the assailant. Bits of plaster were nested in his hair, a shard of rebar at his feet. His left ear wilted askew from the base, the other sporting a strip of red near the tip where it must have taken some injury.

“C'mere,” John said, still on his knees, pulling Sherlock by an elbow, “Let me see if you've damaged anything seriously.”

His fingertips closed around the more grievous looking ear first, before he could even process he'd never touched them before.

“Stings,” Sherlock gasped, flinching. John exercised the appendage to its usual positioning once he was satisfied there was no hemorrhage.

“I'll bet. They feel a bit hot, is that usual?” It reminded him the latent heat of a recently implemented oven mitt. 

Sherlock nodded slightly before John touched a hand to the mark on the other ear. Just a scratch.

“Well, that’s your bell rung, I expect. But nothing torn,” he mumbled, fingers searching curly scalp and discovering a slightly more serious wound. 

“I would have torn him limb from limb if he’d hit you instead of the ceiling,” Sherlock stated gravely, his darkened eyes fixed on their prone captive. John felt a twinge of something fierce under his ribcage, and wanted to say something. He cleared his throat instead and fired off a text to Lestrade before he found his way to his feet again. Sherlock shook some debris from his shoulders before taking John’s offered hand and rising.

“Let's get you home to clean up. I bet we can get a paracetamol off a Yarder while we close up shop. All right?”

At home he made tea while Sherlock showered away his coating of ceiling innards, and prepped an ice pack and hydrogen peroxide. He contemplated a box of bandages considering how awful it would be to peel away such a thing from a lightly furred area, and gave up on the idea.

When Sherlock emerged again, slightly damp and a bit flushed John ushered him to stand under the brightest light in the kitchen. He pressed a comb into John's hand wordlessly. Sherlock looked put out, to John's notice.

"I didn't think this through, you'll have to sit down," he chuckled, vainly reaching to the tips of ears nearly two feet taller than him.

He sat on a stool, knees apart and chin dipped while John carefully combed apart his curls to attend to the injuries. He was very careful not to touch his friend's ears unexpectedly.

"My mother used to comb out my hair. When I was young."

"You're still young," John replied to this unexpected revelation.

"She'd smooth my ears when I'd been practically tearing them off, in a fit," continued Sherlock.

"Sherlock Holmes in a fit, what must that be like?" John teased while prepping a swab with peroxide. His face dropped when Sherlock looked up at him.

"No one does, anymore. But you can. Touch me. My ears, I mean. If you want." He nodded at John's tentative gesture. He dabbed the thin red mark until he was satisfied, then, sensing the knees close in on either side of him- let his fingers linger. He smoothed the fine, velvety hairs to the tip, still warm. Without really thinking of it he found both his hands slowly working their way from the fluffy base of curls up the length of slender fuzzy flesh.

“Softer than I had imagined it,” John admitted.

“Oh, so you have imagined it,” Sherlock said with a supercilious nose scrunch, tipping up his face.

“Erm, yes well,” John stumbled, fingers still buried in the cottony fluff. He couldn't resist, and placed a shy kiss on that nose.

"Just be glad I don't have whiskers," Sherlock mumbled to his lips, planting a proper kiss. The fierce thing in John's chest from earlier flopped over contentedly instead.

"Thank goodness."

**Author's Note:**

> by the way, i'm stitchlock on tumblr [waves hello!]


End file.
